


A Dog Person

by ishtarelisheba



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Gen, I'm so sorry..., non-graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 03:37:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5318987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishtarelisheba/pseuds/ishtarelisheba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back in his pre-Belle Dark Castle days, Rumpelstiltskin takes in a stray kitten.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dog Person

**Author's Note:**

> _( Quickly scribbled after 5x10, while in need of a place to channel some of the hurt. :/ )_

Rumpelstiltskin was a dog person. He always had been. Sheep dogs for work, feeding hungry strays, pausing at the animal merchant’s stall in the village market to watch the puppies stumble over themselves - yes, he was partial to canines. So, when the pathetic, abandoned kitten showed up on the doorstep of the Dark Castle, he was surprised with the pull at his heart that made him bring it inside.

There’d never been cats in the forest. Not the type that lived in houses. There were too many things that ate smaller things, for a domesticated cat to survive, much less long enough to have kittens. He couldn’t imagine how it had gotten from the valley village and up to his castle alive. Luck. Or fate. There was something about this bony little cat, though, and he couldn’t let the thing die on his doorstep.

Separated from its mother too early, he decided as it suckled desperately on his fingertips. So young that it hadn’t had time to be properly weaned. It barely squeaked - so weak that a meow was out of the question. He hid it inside his cloak as he took himself down to the village, to a girl who kept goats. Her eyes near popped from their sockets when he paid a gold coin for a skin full of goat’s milk, but he spirited himself away before she could express more fear.

The kitten began fattening up in days. When it was obvious that it would live, he began considering names. It must have a name, after all. All things needed names.

“Bastet?” he murmured, sitting with the ridiculous, purring thing near the fire. 

She rubbed her head against his palm, rumbling away. A fortnight with still no more than a squeak, and he wondered if perhaps her meow had been starved away. 

He glanced around, as if anyone might be there to witness as he gathered the kitten and held her near his face, touching the tiniest of ears to his nose. “Is that your name?” he whispered, stroking fingertips down the little lumps of her skinny backbone, and she turned her head, butting against his chin.

Regina swanned in one afternoon with a demand of some thing or other that she could do for herself, if she had the patience. The overly affectionate kitten rubbed around her ankles. She swore and gave it a kick, making it skitter beneath the great hall table with an, “Away, you ugly thing.”

He gave the witch a subtle curse on her way out. Her hair would frizz for a weeks.

The cat had called his castle its home for three months when he came home after a deal, wet and cold because he’d materialized in a red mist on the edge of the village and walked through the storm in his frustration and anger. The deal had been successful. A child bartered away in return for a title. Four other haunted little faces had stared in terror at him from the edges of the man’s hovel. Bruises, ribs showing, teeth worn. The babe would have a better chance in the home he chose for it. At least the rest would have food, now.

Darkness was hounding after his thoughts this night, and his mind wasn’t in a shape to ward them off. He took himself right up to his rooms, and there was that bloody little cat, lounging in front of _his_ fireplace. Rumpelstiltskin growled, summoning a nightshirt onto his body to replace his wet leathers, and he’d no more than sat in his chair than the kitten half leapt, half climbed into his lap.

The look he gave her was nothing if not carefully unimpressed. She walked across his thighs, bumping his hand with her nose, and squeaked. 

“Should have named you ‘Mouse,’ shouldn’t I?” he grumped, giving in when she leaned her body against his belly and began to purr. He scritched beneath her chin and wrapped his unoccupied arm around her, not surprised in the least when she stopped holding herself up, and let him support her rapidly increasing weight.

It was absolutely stupid of him to begin relying on that kitten. He’d known it. She’d gone from attacking his spinnings when he was at his wheel, to draping herself over one of his feet while he spun. No matter how far he paced the stone corridors, the cat followed him. He could take himself from one end of the castle to the other in cloud of smoke, and the thing somehow knew _precisely_ where he turned up - he never had to wait more than a minute before she’d run into the room. 

She never did grow out of the habit of suckling on his fingertips, even a year in.

He called and called for her, when she went missing. His name had been spoken, and he went to make a deal. It had been a small thing. Easy, quick. When he returned to the castle, she was gone.

He set out bowls of the fish he’d begun cooking for her, when she started needing more than goat’s milk. He left the little woven blankets - the ones that he absolutely did not make just for the ridiculous feline to sleep on - out on the garden patio and near the castle doorsteps. 

He wouldn’t worry, he told himself. She’d gotten to that age, apparently. That was simply what a cat did. She’d wandered off to adventure, and she would bring herself home with burrs and foreign fleas. He’d have to give her a bath and a charm against the damned pests, now, he expected.

A week with sight of neither hide nor hair, and he went looking for her. He searched in widening circles around the estate, calling, the long hem of his cloak dragging in the grass and dew, grasshoppers fleeing in hopping arcs before him.

He found her under a small grove of young chestnut trees.

Rumpelstiltskin summoned one of her blankets to his hand, and he wrapped it around what was left. Something wild had gotten her. Petted and spoiled as he’d made her, she’d had naught a chance.

No one would have believed the all-powerful Dark One grieving over a cat. He took her into the overgrown, neglected garden that jutted off the side of the castle, and he dug a little grave with a conjured trowel.

He’d never liked graves. It was a horror, giving a once-living being over to the cold ground.

Wrapped in the blanket, he placed the poor thing into the hole. He pushed the dirt back in and tamped it down with his hands, pretending as hard as he could that there were _not_ tears running down his face or hiccups of grief shaking him.

He sat back on his heels, swaying miserably, vowing he’d never try to keep another living creature in this godforsaken place.


End file.
